Once Was Willem

• Author: M.R. Carey
• Genre: Fantasy
• Publication Date: March 4, 2025
• Publisher: Orbit

Thank you to Orbit and Oliver Wehner for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

From bestselling author M.R. Carey comes an utterly unique and enchantingly dark epic fantasy fable like no other.

This is the tale of Once-Was-Willem, who—eleven hundred and some years after the death of Christ, in the kingdom that had but recently begun to call itself England—rose from the dead to defeat a great evil facing the humble village of Cosham.

I hadn’t read any of Carey’s books before coming across this. The summary sounded like a really interesting read, so I couldn’t wait to start it. Unfortunately, I started it a little later than I planned, since the size of the font is very small in the printed book. Luckily, Orbit came through and sent me a link to access an audiobook copy. Since I mainly listened to the audiobook with only sporadic searches in the book for the corresponding text, I’ll be focusing on the audiobook for the most part in this review.

This was one of my most anticipated reads for this month, and I really tried to reserve judgment until I had completed the reading. I tried to give it a read in the print copy, and only made it two or three pages before I had to give up. You know that extra tiny font that classics seem to be printed in? That’s the same size font as this book. 

Luckily the audiobook version was wonderful. I loved Joe Jameson’s narration of Once-Was-Willem. He made the reading feel like the best kind of story time, where each character has their own unique voice, and Jameson even gave some of the more … paranormal characters distinctive and fun voices.

The story has a somewhat dark tone, but not fully crossing into historical fiction or horror, falling into the mash-up historical fantasy genre. There was an overall tone of telling rather than showing, and the beginning of the story is very slow-paced. Normally, I don’t mind when this occurs, since it gives the author room to really develop the world and the characters. 

The story is told in a narrative format, as though Willem himself was reflecting on the various events in his life from a later period in time, and the language used seemed to be authentic for the setting, for the most part, and I’m judging that on my extensive knowledge of Old English through reading one Shakespeare play in high school and still needing the teacher to translate each line into modern-day English to understand. One aspect of learning that I actually *do* know, is Hebrew and Judaism. And this book gave me a vaguely icky feeling, and it took me a while to put my finger on what was bothering me.

Once I did, I realized that the problematic elements in the story probably wouldn’t be obvious or even noticeable to people who aren’t Jewish. To be fair, these are very small details, but they made this a problematic read for me. First of all, Hebrew words are written using small dots and marks above and below the letters, and these are referred to as vowels. So while reading a book that explicitly mentions Christianity, I wasn’t expecting to see anything related to Jewish practices or beliefs. But when I did, I was expecting it to be relayed incorrectly. And the author did exactly what I was hoping he wouldn’t do. He starts out by relaying a story about how God fashioned the world, but then diverges from a bible that would sound fully familiar to us, talking about how a group rebelled against God, and created everything in the world as an act of their rebellion. Which would have been fine, if the name used to describe the group of rebels wasn’t “the Elohim.” Elohim is one of the honorific terms that we use to refer to god, as the creator of our world. But according to the version presented in the story, instead of being the creator of our world, that title is given to a group of rebellious, I don’t know, paranormal beings? Celestial beings? I’m honestly unsure how to characterize them, but I know it presents a disrespectful use of a word that Jewish people use to refer to their creator. Not to mention that Judaism is a CLOSED PRACTICE, so our texts, beliefs, practices, any anything else are for us, and have no place in this story. At the very least, these things didn’t even have a major impact on the story at all, and could have easily been left out without anything changing.

And while we’re talking about appropriation, I don’t understand why authors continue to appropriate aspects of Judaism. Typically I come across this in historical fiction about the Holocaust, and in books featuring witchy beliefs. Apparently, using Hebrew letters makes things seem more legit (unless you actually know how to read and/or understand Hebrew). For example, this quote told me all I needed to know about the author’s research into facts about even the most basic aspects of Judaism:

“This vast body in whose brainpan Cain Caradoc now stood was Samael, also called הלל Haylale or Yaldabaoth, the general of the rebel angels.”

I am not able to reproduce the vowel marks on my keyboard, but the actual pronunciation of the word written in the book was “Hillel,” the name of an influential rabbi and very learned man from the end of the first century BCE. Why does this make a difference? Well, because now Hillel is being equated with Samael, an angel who is sometimes viewed as an adversary or destroyer, as well as Yaldabaoth, an entity that comes from Gnostic mythology and is viewed as an opponent, or destroyer god, to the Jewish god’s creation role. So, what readers are treated to is nothing more than a meaningless word salad of terms pulled from Christian and Gnostic lore, yet is also attributed to the Old Testament, while the three different beliefs are very different.

Overall, I found this book to be a big disappointment. I didn’t discover the offensive aspects of cultural appropriation until I was already well into the book, and I figured I might as well finish it. I shouldn’t have. The time spent reading this felt like it was full of telling and no showing, and the writing followed a very formulaic pattern of “meet character A. Learn about their life. Move to next town and meet character B. Learn about their life.” I struggled to stay focused and had to go back to earlier chapters and reread them multiple times to understand what was happening. The narrative style of the story makes it feel like a character is telling you a story, as opposed to the style of writers like Richard Swan or Nicholas Pullen, who are capable of making me feel like I’m actually in the story and experiencing it along with the characters. Between the antisemitism underpinning the author’s appropriation and the feeling that I wasn’t really being told a cohesive, single story, but something more like The Canterbury Tales, a collection of vaguely related chapters. And while the majority of my low star ratings are absolutely an ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ situation, in this one I can confidently say ‘it’s not me, it’s you,’ and that’s why I’m not making my usual ‘you might like this more than I did if:’ list here.

As a Jewish reader with close family ties to Israel, I have been relying on books as a form of escapism. There is already so much antisemitism to be found around the world presently, I actively choose to read intriguing stories to manage my overwhelming anxiety and fears stemming from intergenerational trauma. But then I read this book, set in the mid-1100s, and realize that even as much as things have changed in the nearly one thousand years since this book supposedly took place, people still feel entitled to borrow Jewish culture, spirituality, and mysticism, which was historically turned against us and used to justify ethnic cleansing and massacres with accusations of blood libel. These same blood libels began to be used in the mid-1100s, with Jews being accused of stealing Christian children to kill them and use their blood in rituals, resulting in massacres or expulsion from their host country all across Europe. Instead, I’m going to link a wonderful Jewish-centered and Jewish-written historical fantasy.

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